Real-Life First-Person Shooter Viral Filmmakers Are Back With Alien Sequel

Remember the viral video where a team of British indie filmmakers made a real-life zombie video game in their backyard and selected random people on Chatroulette as the players?

The artists responsible—the crew at Realm Pictures—are back with “Level 2”: a bigger, scarier, more extraterrestrial-filled sequel that pays tribute to the 1979 Ridley Scott film Alien.

Production designer Shaz Abdullah (better known on Reddit as user dartmoorninja) explains the concept for Upvoted:

“We really wanted to do something sci-fi, with a little less action and a bit more atmosphere, taking cues from more survival horror … than first-person shooter [games].”

The highly anticipated sequel to “Level 1” (their first attempt at combining a real-life gaming world with live video chat) maintains the structure that made the original so successful: random strangers from all over the world are randomly paired with the filmmakers through Chatroulette, and the first image they see is a screen that reads, “Type [start] to begin.”

This time around, however, the next scene is a staticky video call for help from a headset-wearing space commander.

“Hello? Can you hear me?” she asks.“Thank God. I’ve just received a distress call from one of our ships that’s about to be destroyed.”

After supplying a bit of context, she signs off with the familiar words, “Please, you’re our only hope.”

What follows is a compilation—edited together by the filmmakers—of dozens of Chatroulette users experiences “playing” the video game world Realm constructed, modeled after the sets of Alien.

View Realm’s behind-the-scenes production photos below:

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Chatroulette users see through the eyes of the main character through GoPros—attached to the helmets of Dave Roth and Liam Brennan (Reddit user reiku_85). The participants dictate the Roth and Brennan’s movements by simply telling them what to do, often giving hilariously bad instructions.

Shaz Abdullah, Realm’s production designer, shares how the team built the elaborate set:

“The crew took four days in total to transform Fawley Power station in Southampton into the bowels of our ‘spaceship.’ A huge amount of time went into the design and layout to make it as immersive as we could.”

The execution is flawless—with realistic control panels, alien egg sacs, a cute R2D2-like robot for comic relief, and an impressively detailed original Caterpillar P-5000 power loader (“I just wanted to fulfill childhood ambitions there,” Abdullah admits).

“We had such an overwhelmingly positive response to the first ,” Abdullah explains. “With Level 2, we know we had an audience, and needed to exceed every expectation from the first and show how with a budget and the right people, we could take things to the next level.”

Wait, was that a pun?

“Pun not intended,” Abdullah adds.

The video ends with a teaser for Realm’s future follow-up, dubbed “Level 3″—much to the chagrin of players who just wanted the game to continue. But unlike with the surprise success of Level 1, this time the filmmakers already have plans for the sequel.

Instead of keeping the same formula, the indie filmmakers want to involve fans early on, offering behind-the-scenes access to the production process in exchange for a small donation to help fund the film (“No more than £1,” Abdullah notes).

Then, instead of turning to Chatroulette as the sole means of finding participants, the filmmakers plan to give 50 randomly selected crowdfunding backers the opportunity to play the full world Realm is creating for Level 3: an immersive, hour-long gaming experience, broken up into 10-minute chapters.

Want to learn more about the filmmakers behind Levels 1 and 2 of “First Person Shooter”? Listen to Dave Reynolds and Shaz Abdullah (Reddit users DaveMReynolds and dartmoorninja) on Episode 35 of the Upvoted podcast.